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No. 2 (2024): Comunità nella clinica e nella contemporaneità

In Gaza where death no longer looks like anything

  • Giovanni Goffredo
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3280/gruoa2-2024oa22923
Submitted
maggio 27, 2026
Published
2026-06-17

Abstract

The article analyses the current humanitarian tragedy unfolding in the Gaza Strip, starting from the thought of intellectual figures such as Simone Weil, Walter Benjamin and Primo Levi, and placing it in dialogue with the historical memory of the Shoah. What the author highlights is how contemporary horror carries with it the risk of transforming ancient victims into new executioners, perpetrating over time a trauma that renews itself and changes its object, masquerading as a power that acts in a reckless, barbaric and confused manner, and which thus results in a seemingly unstoppable destructive drive. The author, through the living testimonies of journalist Alaa Mattar and the voices of Gazan poets, analyzes the inhuman war in Gaza, the extermination of a population and the erasure of the civilization of a territory, which occurs under the helpless gaze of the world; the discourse then broadens towards a global political criticism, identifying figures such as Netanyahu, Trump and Musk as the promoters of a new “technofascism” or “post-modern autocracy”, and in strategies “shock and awe” a new form of neo-colonial domination control. This is why the author, in conclusion, indicates in poetry, and in “small daily resistances” (small books, small publishing houses, small gestures, small Sumuds), the only way to preserve humanity against the prevailing nihilism and to restore the lucidity of consciousness. Poetry as a testimony to the courage and pulsating blood of humanity; a unique gaze, that of poetry, of the subject before the world and its pain, and therefore a courageous and human gaze before the incomprehensible mystery of the universe turned to good.

 

 

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